It’s Not Just Those Institutions, Is It?

Dr Nicholas Newcombe turned a blind eye while his wife, Dr Jill Newcombe-Buley punched, slapped and smothered the three children and hit one with a stiletto and another with a dustbin lid.

Not their own children, oh no.

These were adopted children, placed with them – unbelievably – by Cheshire SS.

A review of the case discovered that social services had ignored the warnings of one of the children and it was only when a consultant paediatrician intervened that the abuse was uncovered.

The case beggers belief in so many ways…

Cheshire East Local Safeguarding Children board found that the institutions that should have protected the children had been blinded by 'perceptions and assumptions' about the couple's social standing.

In other words ‘No, they are middle-class doctors, pillars of the community, they’d never do such a thing!’.

So what was the point of all those advertising campaigns telling people that abuse is found in all sorts of families? Especially if it seems it was never included in your own training material…?

Mr Brabbs said: 'The children went from being "rescued" from the exposure to significant harm within their birth family only to end up being placed in another abusive situation where they were subjected to repeated and systematic physical abuse, emotional harm and neglect.

'The specific nature of the abuse, and the manner in which it was carried out, by adults who chose to adopt vulnerable children, is hard to comprehend.'

Quite. And this was across the board, not one institution’s failing, but that of several:

Chris Brabbs, author of a report by a serious case review panel came to the 'inescapable conclusion is that the children were badly let down by all four schools who failed to record, or act on, their direct observations of a number of indicators of possible physical neglect and/or emotional abuse'.

Adding that the children had built up 'enormous resilience' and staff struggled to make sense of the contradictory evidence of the children doing well at school.

School friends had also tried to raise the alarm, and for this they were praised, but again social services failed to act saying there was not enough evidence to support their claims.

He concluded by saying that alarm bells should have rung at Stoke-on-Trent social services when it was revealed that the couple had never lived together, they had huge work pressures and a lack of experience around children.

Alarm bells shouldn’t have been ringing, because they should never, ever have been offered these children in the first place!

So, why were they?

'The adoption panel allowed itself to be sucked into the attractiveness of the fact that these applicants were offering a rare and highly sought after commodity - a willingness to take a sibling group of three,' Mr Brabbs said.

I suspect they’d have offered them the children even if they’d smoked! No, wait, let's not go too far.

But the justice system seems to have been ‘blinded by 'perceptions and assumptions' about the couple's social standing’ as well, given the utterly pathetic sentences:

In October 2010 Dr Newcombe-Buley was given a four year prison sentence for child cruelty while her husband was given a 12-month suspended sentence after admitting neglect.

Out, and no doubt working in a town near you. Maybe even your GP?

But it’s not his fault, oh no. He’s the victim here, along with his bitch of a wife.

They shouldn’t have been given the children, you see…

Dr Newcombe, who has since moved to Macclesfield, has said he was too busy to meet Mr Brabbs adding that he was 'still finding the whole situation extremely upsetting' adding that he, Dr Newcombe-Buley and the children were 'badly let down' by social services.

He claimed they were negligent in placing three young children with two parents with almost no experience of looking after children, and that they did not provide sufficient practical and emotional support.

Did it not occur to you or Ilsa The She-Wolf to say ‘No’?

And just what sort of ‘practical and emotional support’ did you, an educated man, need in order to not treat your children like a barely sub-human savage…?